> That said, I often think twice about posting anything meaningful; I know I'll get a bit frustrated when I put myself out there in good faith, and people have nothing to say, but downvote anyway.

I've notice more and more people say this and it's a sentiment I feel myself too. Personally I don't come on HN half as much as I used to because I just don't fancy putting myself out there when, at times, it can be a flip of the coin whether your gain or lose "points" over it.

I know it's just numbers and it shouldn't bother me; but it does. Judging by the comments others have posted, I'm not unique in that regard either.

In any case, HN will keep rolling on albeit the signal to noise ratio will gradually worsen over time as people get more apathetic about spending their time writing a high value post.

>Personally I don't come on HN half as much as I used to because I just don't fancy putting myself out there when, at times, it can be a flip of the coin whether your gain or lose "points" over it.

I just accept that Hacker News culture can be vitriolic and petty and that anything I say that's even mildly controversial to someone might be downvoted, and I'll probably never know why, beyond the obvious fact that at least one person disagreed for some reason. It's much easier to participate here once you stop caring about it, though.

My account's even been rate-limited now, and rather than letting that serve its intended purpose of driving me away from the site altogether, it just helps me focus on writing better comments which sometimes get downvoted even more than they otherwise might.

Like the movie says, it's Chinatown. This aspect of Hacker News culture is never going to change.

Ditto

>The times when there's a dead post that I don't think should be dead, it's usually from a person who has worn out his welcome with other comments. This is why I say moderation isn't the main problem, contrary to the parent reply

It really annoys me when I see this happen cross subject/thread. Someone's opinion about zoning has no impact on the correctness of their opinion about low level disk IO.

With a minimum level of karma, you can vouch for a dead comment which will resurrect it. You click on the time the comment was posted and then click vouch.

I think the “drive-by downvoting from people with nothing to say” problem could be solved by requiring down voters to type even a short rationale. Good ol Slashdot did this well 20 years ago with the “reason” drop-down you needed to select from when downvoting.

The reflexive downvoting of earnest opinions is a problem, as evidenced by parent.

I'm occasionally surprised by downvotes and wished I knew why they were issued, but overall I would rather permit silent downvotes than have every disagreement spawn another comment.

The tit-for-tat exchange of conflicting earnest opinions has degraded many other discussion systems. My wife used to comment a lot on a newspaper that used Facebook comments. Some articles would have hundreds of comments, with 3/4 of them coming from a small core of people rehashing fundamental differences of opinion.

Without downvoting, many people can't ignore bad comments because "someone is wrong on the internet." Leaving bad posts untouched looks like an implicit signal of community approval. But countering predictable comments with predictable responses makes the whole discussion worse.

My favorite comment chains here are ones where I upvote the original, then the counterpoint, then the refutation to the counterpoint; everyone in the chain is making good, fresh arguments or observations.

My least favorite comment chains are ones where someone opines aggressively, which spawns a sarcastic reply, which leads to a heated response... In those cases I'm happy that I can downvote everyone involved without having to add any more text.